It's Okay To Change Your Mind

How To Pivot When You've Taken On Belief Systems You've Now Outgrown

When I look back on the things I wrote when I first started blogging in 2008, one part of me feels ashamed at how foolish, arrogant, and wrongheaded I was, while another more compassionate part of me thinks “How cute and young and naïve that girl was.” Another part is proud because, once I learn better, I tend to admit when I change my point of view, rather than denying it or covering it up or pretending I never believed such foolishness. Another more perfectionistic part of me hates making mistakes and wishes I could just erase from the internet and my old books things I regret putting in writing.

For example, when I finished my OB/GYN residency at Northwestern University, I was 100% indoctrinated into “The Northwestern Way.” We believed our way of practicing Obstetrics and Gynecology was superior to every other academic training program, including the Ivy League institutions, which we looked down our noses at.

So when I started my first OB/GYN job at Sharp Mary Birch Hospital For Women in San Diego, a hospital similar to Northwestern’s Prentice Women’s Hospital, but without the academic affiliation, I felt it was my duty to call out every way that doctors at that hospital were not in compliance with The Northwestern Way. Even though I was only thirty years old and I was calling out people twenty years my senior, many of whom had advanced training in Maternal Fetal Medicine and years more experience, I felt morally obligated to tell them that it was bad medicine to try to stop preterm labor with dangerous tocolytic agents beyond 34 weeks gestation. Arrogant little whippersnapper that I was, I knew that those drugs had side effects for both the mother and the baby that could be worse than the impact of a baby of being born 5 weeks before the due date. I judged that these more senior doctors were just trying to stop preterm labor in the middle of the night so they didn’t have to come in from home and do the delivery, making it good for the doctor but bad for the patient.

I was not wrong in my medical advice. The hospital did make a rule about ten years later to prevent this abuse of tocolytics. But I was wrong in my arrogance and superiority about The Northwestern Way, I was wrong to treat more experienced doctors like they were bad people, and I was wrong to think conventional medicine had everything figured out.

By the time I left my job as a doctor in 2007, I was thoroughly disillusioned by conventional medicine in general and The Northwestern Way in particular. It led me to write a book I never published about how terribly I was abused- criminally so, in some instances- as an OB/GYN resident at Northwestern. (I did win an award for a short story I wrote about it though, which you can read here or listen to me reading here.)

Unlike some disillusioned doctors, like the Covid contrarians Christiane Northrup, Zach Bush, or Kelly Brogan, I didn’t throw away my medical education, turn on my belief in the goodness of conventional medicine, or contradict public health guidelines during a global pandemic. But I did feel humbled by everything I learned after medical school about mind body medicine, the impact of trauma on the body, the value of some alternative medicine practices, and the benefits of the therapeutic relationship that many people find very healing in alternative medicine practices, which is vastly different than the 7 1/2 minutes they may get from their insurance-covered physician. (If you go to LissaRankin.com, you can download the free 44 Revelations About Healing They Did Not Teach Me In Medical School right on the home page.)

The problem is that, in the beginning, I swung a bit too far the other way. I gave too much credit to people who turned out to be discredited. As I wrote about in Love Bigger, which I’m drip-releasing to my paid subscribers and which I told a story I’m embarrassed about here, I was too porous in my discernment to shield out damaging New Age beliefs that caused me to harm myself and others. Part of why I wrote Love Bigger was to out myself about some of the belief systems I had taken on and parroted. Like when I went on Conspirituality podcast and stood in solidarity with Rebekah Borucki in calling out Hay House for racist behaviors, it was part of me making amends with people I had unwittingly harmed because of spiritual bypassing belief systems that lack empathy and may oppress those in marginalized groups, including marginalized exiles in our own internal family systems.

I still cringe when I read things I wrote ten years ago, including some of the things I published in books I can’t now change. I wish I’d never promoted beliefs like your soul chose your trauma, anything you judge in others is just a projection of what you don’t like about yourself, or you can think yourself healthy if only your positive thoughts are strong enough. Although there may be some baby in the bathwater of beliefs like that, I mostly don’t believe any of those things anymore. They were all beliefs that unintentionally made me feel in control when life spun out of control, or they comforted me when life didn’t feel fair, or they falsely empowered me when I felt disempowered.

I did feel lucky to have the chance to completely rewrite Mind Over Medicine in the revised 2020 edition, which gave me the chance to add in things I just didn’t know when I published the original version in 2013, things like Internal Family Systems and other cutting edge trauma healing models. While I don’t have anything more to add to my art school textbook Encaustic Art, writing about personal growth, spirituality, mind body medicine, or trauma means you’re constantly learning and growing and changing your point of view. And if you’re not, then your pride is interfering with your ability to say “I changed my mind” or “I don’t believe what I used to believe anymore” or “I’m sorry if my former teaching influenced you and caused harm to you or others- and what can I do to make it right?”

It’s not easy to admit when we make mistakes or passed on teachings or stuff from the internet that may be harmful to ourselves or others. It’s embarrassing to be wrong, especially if you’re wrong publicly. But I believe it’s a humble sign of maturity and Self-leadership to be able to say, “Hey, you know that conspiracy theory I really believed was true, the one I pressured you to believe too? Well, I screwed up when I ended my relationship with you because you didn’t share my belief. And now I want to make it up you to and see if we can repair this relationship if you’re up for that.”

It’s a sign of wisdom to be able to say “I regret using my influence to pass on a belief I no longer agree with,” especially if that belief hurt people.

We’ve got to have ways of off-ramping if we’ve been indoctrinated or radicalized into cult-like thinking, believing disinformation, teaching things that are false, or passing on belief systems that can really hurt people. Doing so requires shame resilience. We have to have enough nervous system regulation to tolerate feeling the discomfort of being wrong and admitting wrongdoing. Somatic Experiencing tools, like the ones taught by Resmaa Menakem in My Grandmother’s Hands about anti-racism and Monsters In Love about relational integrity, can help.

I admire this ability to learn, change your mind, regroup, admit what was wrong, and adapt your beliefs in other people. In my experience, Internal Family Systems founder Dick Schwartz is like that. Like me, Dick has been certain- and wrong- time and time again. But he’s also been wise to surround himself with people he trusts, people who feel safe enough to challenge him and call him out when he doesn’t quite get it right. For example, as a family therapist, he once believed you couldn’t heal from an eating disorder unless you healed the external family system. You needed to change Mom and Dad in order to heal the child. He didn’t think the patient’s internal world mattered much at all. It was their outer world that needed to change.

But his patients, most of them teenage girls, taught him otherwise. Yes, it’s helpful to get a child with an eating disorder out of an overly controlling family system. But it also turns out to be helpful to get parts of the one with the eating disorder to stop exiling the wounded inner children inside, and to stop trying to bully the disordered eating part into eating right, to have compassion for its good intentions instead- and to heal the exiled inner children.

Like me and my medical training, many other beliefs about what does and doesn’t work to heal trauma had to get deprogrammed in Dick Schwartz over the years. Although Dick Schwartz gets most of the credit, developing the IFS model was a collaborative process between Dick and many other therapists in the IFS community, many of them wise women. Dick was smart, wise, and humble enough to allow in their influence. Without doing so, IFS would not be what it is today.

Speaking of which, I use my influence to educate people about Internal Family Systems. But I don’t think that model is perfect either. There are a few things about IFS I do not 100% agree with. I think there are some limitations, like:

-If a child doesn’t learn relational life skills, morality, boundaries, etc, Self won’t automatically know these skills, so we might need to support trauma survivors with psychoeducation and relational skill building.

-Limiting beliefs caused by trauma might need more healing than just being sent to the elements.

-IFS is not a panacea, nor is any trauma healing method. At least in conventional medicine, we have some humility about this. We know that penicillin works great for strep throat but it doesn’t do shit for Covid. IFS is not the right medicine for every single trauma survivor at any point in their journey, although it can be very helpful to many at the right time.

Although it’s been a game changer for me, there are other issues I have with the IFS model, all of which I’ve discussed with the IFS community, and which I encourage you to question for yourself. I’ll be publishing more on that in the future, so stay tuned to my regular newsletter list at LissaRankin.com if you want to make sure not to miss it.

What About You?

So…this is a long preamble so I can ask you, dear reader, what beliefs you’ve taken on over the years that you’ve simply outgrown. What beliefs were you prepared to die on that hill for that you now realize no longer serve you or others? Maybe you had racist or homophobic parents and you took on their racist or homophobic beliefs that you now realize are oppressive and wrong-headed. Maybe you took on spiritual bypassing belief systems that you now realize get in the way of healing your trauma, protecting yourself, holding others accountable, and pursuing justice, which caused you to commit microaggressions, not only towards people in marginalized groups, but also towards your own marginalized exiles. Maybe you believed conspiracy theories that have since been disproven.

All of this is okay. It’s okay to make mistakes. It’s okay to mess up. It’s human to do so. It’s okay to admit when you do something hurtful to yourself or others. It’s okay to be imperfect- and to model accountability, making apologies, and making amends when you do so.

Imagine if more of our public figures could model this. Imagine if people in Congress could just do an about face and say “Oops, I fucked up. My bad. Let’s make this right.” Imagine if enablers of narcissistic abusers, people like Oprah, who platformed countless sexual offenders like John of God and then pretended she never did, could just say “I had a discernment failure and I’m sorry if I hurt anyone. How can I make this right?” Imagine if influencers who promoted conspiracy theories and denied the existence of a deadly pandemic could pivot and hold themselves to account for the harm they’ve done?

Imagine if we all could?

*If suppression of justice-seeking parts, spiritual bypassing belief systems, or lack of knowledge about how to do relational repair has interfered with your healing, you’re invited to a new six week Zoom series The Path To Inner Justice, an IFS course about how to heal, let go, and move on- without bypassing justice, spiritual bypassing, accountability, and relational repair when possible.

Learn more and register for The Path To Inner Justice here.

I’d love to hear how you’ve changed your beliefs over the years too. The more we can normalize that it’s okay to try on beliefs and then change our minds, the more we can give ourselves permission to let go of beliefs that no longer serve us and create safe off ramps for others who do the same.

*Art credit Austin Kleon